31st July 2006 Archive

A total saving of £412m on all purchases was achieved through frameworks and managed service agreements negotiated by the Treasury buying agency OGCbuying.solutions. Its annual report, published on 25 July 2006, says that the savings exceed the £400m target set by ministers and were delivered on £2.7bn of public sector expenditure.

Google's $90m payout over click fraud has been approved by a US court. Some opponents had claimed that the figure was not high enough to cover losses, but an Arkansas judge has thrown the objection out.

Data warehousing has historically been regarded as an environment which was specifically about analysing historic data, either to understand what has happened or, more recently, in order to try to predict what will happen: for example, to try to predict customers likely to churn.

The EU is planning to fingerprint children from as young as six, and earlier just as soon as it is technically feasible, according to documents obtained by Statewatch. The matter has already caused considerable debate (albeit behind closed doors and with no visible civil liberties concerns) among member states, but is being pushed ahead as part of a broader push towards biometric identifiers, without reference to the European Parliament.

Three men were last week cleared of charges after one of the global war on terror's more ludicrous trials. They had been accused of an imaginary plot to produce an imaginary radioactive 'dirty' bomb using an imaginary substance. Imagination throughout proceedings was greatly aided by the efforts of Mazher Mahmood, the imaginary "fake sheikh" who produces scoops for the News of the World, which has been known to imagine itself a newspaper.

419 advanced fee scammers have created an exact copy of the Interpol website, which is expected to be used to dupe victims into believing they are dealing with the real International Criminal Police Organisation.

Apple has asked owners of its 15in MacBook Pro notebook who bought their machine between February and May 2006 to contact the company and request a replacement battery. Apple stressed the batteries it wants to replace "do not pose a safety risk".

ATI has posted its Catalyst 6.7 driver package. For Windows users, the download is backed by WHQL certification, but Linux fans haven't been ignored - a version of the drivers for the open source operating system has also been released.

Opera is pushing a vision of a browser that works on any device or operating system platform, including mobile devices and gaming consoles, as part of a push designed to persuade more users to switch from Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer web browser.

It's happened again. Another Dell notebook, a Latitude D410, has burst into flames, this time in Singapore. According to the machine's owner a series of popping noises culminated in a surfeit of white smoke and "flames coming up the side of the laptop".

Persuading businesses to invest in new or upgraded IT infrastructure can be a testing task at the best of times. The deployment of a new application can be a good time to review existing infrastructure to make sure it is running securely and efficiently, but why wait for a new application to upgrade infrastructure when there can be considerable benefits for all the existing applications?

Microsoft will not cut the price of its Xbox 360 games console before Christmas, the company's head of European Xbox marketing, has revealed. Maybe not, but it looks like Microsoft will stress its machine's price advantage when Sony ships the PlayStation 3.

Verizon has unbundled the music portion of its Vcast multimedia bundle, effectively scrapping the $15 monthly hurdle needed to download digital music. Vcast is Verizon's subscription service which includes videos and games, and until today, the Vcast music store.

The world's graphics-chip makers shipped 71.4m personal computer-oriented GPUs in Q2, 16.6 per cent up on the year-ago quarter but down 4.6 per cent on the previous three-month period, market watcher Jon Peddie Research (JPR) said today.

HTC, the company behind the T-Mobile MDA, O2 XDA and Orange SPV mobile phones, not to mention a host of others offered by less well-known vendors, has broken away from its white label roots to offer its phones without operator customisation. The TyTN is one of the first...

The controversial French law which would have forced Apple to make music from its iTunes online shop playable on any device has been rejected by the French Constitutional Council. The whole law may have to be rewritten.

Billy Bragg has paid tribute to social networking giant MySpace after persuading it to change its terms and conditions. The site is owned by owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and changed its terms after lobbying by Bragg.

BT has bought Telexis Polska, Fiat's inhouse telecoms business in the eastern European country, for €$1.2m. Telexis is not exactly huge - it turned over €3m for the year ending 31 December 2005 and has just 27 staff.

What are we to make of the latest news about Microsoft Office – namely the story that the company has opted to charge people to download betas rather than cut off the supply? It reckons it has supplied 500 per cent more betas than it planned.

Good Technology's Good Mobile Messaging - the application formerly known as GoodLink - runs on Nokia's E61 smart phone, the company said today, even though the app, now at version 4.9.1, actually shipped last week. The client-side application can be downloaded here, for both Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM Lotus Domino back-end servers. ®

Berkeley city council in California has become the latest city to examine municipal ownership of "the last mile", a move which could deal the latest blow to the stalling Municipal Wi-Fi movement. Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley voted to investigate a fiber to the home (FTTH) scheme a few days earlier.

Alien hunters today pounded the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute here with e-mails and phone calls, following claims made this weekend that the organization has covered up the detection of signals from space.